LEGAL HORROR STORIES
Pending Appeal
The morning had seemed endless, as the crowd in the court waited for it to give birth to the afternoon, and the case could start. The judge’s clerk peered at her phone. Through the fluorescent lights of the court, she could see it was five minutes to midday. Five minutes more until the federal witching hour was once more to begin, though this was to be a more personal haunting than she had ever previously experienced. Five more minutes until the undead would overwhelm the courtroom, as the long dead came back to haunt the halls of justice. Unbeknownst to themselves, they were coming for her too. She felt sick. Maybe it was in dread of what was to come later this day, afterwards. Maybe it was the cause of the dread — she felt it was impossible to say what element of it was in her and what was not at this point, no matter what anyone could say. She knew what she had done and she knew what she had planned. She recalled the illicit drops of a few moments of pleasure — a pleasure so natural, yet not so in the eyes of so many of her supposed peers present today. Were her crime to be known, the howling dogs of the undead would have her condemned here for clandestinely doing something so evil, so malign, so far still legal. Still yet they might, depending on what lay ahead. She gazed on the vanilla folder that held her little bundle of handwritten notes she had made cataloguing the arguments she toyed with both for and against the appeal, secured beneath her copy of the bench memo itself. She flicked the folder open, and as the noise grew she tried to focus on the first lines she had written for him.
She must have read the name of the case a dozen times, before looking to her phone again, and as she had feared four more minutes remained. The din of expectation, of hunger, was impossible to ignore. She carefully breathed in sweaty stench of intellectual decay, of fetid attitudes, and breath made more foul by the welling hatred within. She surveyed the courtroom gallery as it throbbed and bulged, the sway of the capacity crowd creating the sense of a dark hungry sea, with fathomless depths, ebbing and flowing. In only a few minutes, she feared this sea would engulf all, and erode all trace of the people who constituted it. It felt to her like she could almost list them individually by their tribe: the earnest young men who wore their cleverness more ambitiously than their aftershave; the pious preachers in expensive shoes and cheap hair gel who claimed they feared only God more than they did communists, though that term now seemed to cover all dissenting voices; the humorless “mothers” groups — all hairspray and outrage — whose children now had children who could vote. And the journalists emitting alcohol and cocaine from every other pore, themselves smelling jurisprudential blood in the air — journalists ready to drink every drop down and regurgitate it once into the mouths of their media of choice, where an army of men would analyze and project onto every nuance recorded today. The sea would drink all of them in and spit out a mob. The undead had come early and marked their territory.
She gently thumbed the sheaf of notes, looking up at the slow second hand of the clock above the stand. Somehow there were three more minutes left before the Judge would make his entrance. He was a theatrical kind of man, she thought, and had always been. For such a good, solid, reliable conservative — just like his father in that regard — he seemed to overly enjoy what drama he could create in the court. She recalled one time seeing him in his chambers adjusting and readjusting his robes in the mirror; he once lamented to her that had the founding fathers just waited a few more years, he might have been able to get a wig too. It struck her that his father would be looking down on him from heaven with utter disdain for this — sitting in high judgement in death as he did in life. She smiled under her face at the thought that the only thing that would probably shake her judge was the disapproval of his father, and she guessed incorrectly that the fear of his disapproval was a major reason why he had never married. As she smiled again, she felt the urge to go the bathroom. She sighed louder than she might have — she had just gone before coming in ten minutes before — and then smiled again at the thought of the drama she herself could create by standing up before this boisterous crowd and walking out just seconds before the judge was to walk in. She cleared the notion from her head by trying to recall his visits for dinner to her Daddy’s house when she was just a kid, her Daddy just a state senator, and the judge just a young lawyer in her Daddy’s firm. It probably helped that his father was on the state supreme court too, but she liked to think that it was because as a young man, the judge had always been kind and mannerly and that her father respected that. She couldn’t remember much of the dinners themselves beyond her mother’s freshly baked bread, and it being the only time when there was wine on the table. She did remember how well dressed he was coming to the door though, and him always bringing an exquisitely selected bouquet of flowers for her mother. “That’s why I know you’re going to amount to something” her father would say — “most men don’t think of that kind of thing, the little details.” She almost dropped into a giggle at the thought, but held firm against it, her bladder, and the pressure of the swelling room.
She turned and looked at all the leering faces — she knew that they weren’t looking at her, weren’t even conscious of her being there, but it felt like they were looking at her. It was easy to rationalize that the sooner things got underway, the sooner it was over, the sooner she could make it to her appointment, but it didn’t feel any better. She instinctively reached for her phone again, and impulsively stopped herself. The time wasn’t going to have changed. Instead, she glanced at her watch, which told her it was 11.59 with its old-fashioned roman numerals. She rode the adrenaline rush for a moment before remembering that she always set it a minute fast so she would never be late. A gift from Daddy for getting into law school. It was more jewelry than function at this point, but more precious to her than anything or anyone else in the room, whatever its value. All the same, if the appeal was successful, she toyed with the idea of pawning it to raise funds to get out of state for the weekend — out of jurisdiction if need be. She could probably get the money together to do so, but not at this short notice. Daddy could cover it, but he’d want to know why. She couldn’t answer him: she was too bad a liar, and the real reason would break his heart. What happened to Daddy’s girl? Editor of yearbook and valedictorian; president of the Thetas; VP for the Federalists; clerking on the federal circuit: her future was traced out ahead of her in a straight line. And it made her so tired. She did the right things the right way, even when she wasn’t entirely sure why or whether she agreed with it or not. She knew she had Daddy’s approval, but when she thought about it she was just so tired — she didn’t even have the energy to come up with a better word. She was tired of being upset over every issue, and tired of having to share this outrage with others — it wasn’t that she challenged it really, it just it felt so exhausting and non-productive. Tiring. And it was starting to seem to her that maybe there might be some problems with some of it — this particular case right now was going to make things very hard for her to stay on that straight line. Did she want that anyway? The only thing she knew was that she was tired of being what everyone wanted her to be. Right now she just wanted to sleep — the manila folder would be pillow enough for her.
She wasn’t asleep, but an alarm going off woke her up. A tinny hourly chime from a watch in front of the gallery. It was the lead attorney for the appellant, and she knew without looking that his watch was set a minute early. The first time she met him, he bragged that every night his wife would set his watch was a minute fast for him, so he could be early for everything. She hated that story, so much so she thought she could taste blood in her mouth. Not because it was really her story, but because she knew that a digital watch didn’t need to be set — the facts were very clear to her now. She had found it charming — maybe even endearing — the first time she heard it. That was just after the first case she wrote the bench memo for — she had been proud of her work, had put hours into it, but then this guy comes by and talks about getting his wife to check his watch for him, and the whole case was suddenly settled history. And she had to admit that he was charming that night in the bar when they were celebrating winning the case. He was charming the next time she met him too, a couple of weeks later, his silver temples glinting in the late spring sun. And a month or two after, when she was caught in a downpour and he offered to drive her back to her car in the back lot, he was practically… Well, she cannot blame herself for it now — she just had to realize that she was a sucker for a man with a vision: “I can’t remember if I need to row it to shore, or if I gotta wade it there, but I am going to be one of the men who finally saves this nation, yessiree!” She could see a boyish magnetism in his supposed cleverness in the moment, and honestly, even him being Catholic didn’t matter. In the moment. She was so naïve. Almost as naïve as going to him, ready to break the news, starting by pleading with him to leave his wife. The response he chose changed everything for her, and the real news she had to present rusted in her mouth before she could say anything. He had dismissed her appeal, and so they continued on as though nothing had changed. She didn’t know what to do with her news, so she did nothing. And now, 3 weeks later, she had finally made a choice, and everything was scheduled for later this afternoon — of all days — when he was unconsciously doing what he could to prevent her ever doing anything again. She could try to say something, but who was going to believe her over a family man who read at the Cathedral every Sunday? Damnit, he still served at morning mass on weekdays when he didn’t have a case. He was exactly the kind of guy she had always said she wanted to settle down with — and kind of still was. He saw her wistfully smile in his direction at that moment, and he winked back, mouthing “see you after!”, and winking again to make his intentions clear. It was like buckshot in her mouth but she still mouthed the same thing back to him.
Time had come to an end. She looked around and the whole courtroom seemed to have slowed down. She saw the journalists trading notes and nudging each other. The clever young men exchanged words with each other, and the preachers nodded beatifically to the mothers groups who giggled mirthlessly in acknowledgement. They were all there, hungry for the sacrifice, a grotesque feast for overfed gourmets of outrage. As she looked, she imagined them interspersed with other women — bruised girls of 14 and 15, haggard women in later years, prom queens and angry goth kids and the plain Jane that nobody remembers. Women and girls, of all shapes and sizes and ages and attitudes, slowly being crushed by the crowd, until they disappear before ever having a chance at their own lives. For a moment, she saw herself there too now, wedged for a moment between a preacher and a clever young man before being squeezed out of existence by the bulk of the two looming over her. She closed her eyes and turned away at the thought. She opened them just in time to see the second hand collide with the other two to signal 12, and the court doors part, and her youthful-faced judge with a smile and a bow tie come through them, robes flowing, and his place in history assured.